We now have three generations of Americans who came of age during major political scandals in the White House: Watergate (Richard M. Nixon), Iran-Contra (Ronald W. Reagan), and the Plame affair (George W. Bush). The last generation to come of age during a White House administration that worked for Main Street rather than Wall Street (Franklin D. Roosevelt) is fading fast.

The benefits we take for granted today, i.e. Social Security, Food Stamps and Medicare, came out of the New Deal programs of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Those benefits, however, were not a gift from the U.S. Government; they were, rather, an achievement by the American people, through organized efforts to confront Wall Street in Congress and in every state and city across the country, where millions suffered the indignity of poverty during the Great Depression, caused by the financial elite. Turning things around today requires no less.

Democracy is a discursive process, where citizens discuss public issues and social challenges. Whether they gather in their local church, school, or online, it is the discussion of ideas and events that enables them to arrive at group wisdom–something we see in the jury system.

Through letters to the editor, and comments on news stories and editorials, this exchange of ideas and perspectives facilitates the examination of beliefs and values, leading to clearer understanding. Sometimes, by reexamining what we think we know to be true, we discover that we were mistaken.

In today’s media of recycled press releases posing as news, there is a lot of propaganda, but little journalism. This creates a lot of heat, but little light.

Habitual opinions in this social environment–created by public relations (PR) marketing firms–are thus commodities, acquired in the same manner as other consumer goods. These competing commodified narratives are consequently similar to rival cheer-leading squads, espousing slogans for their team.

In The Creation of Discursive Monoculture, I discussed how the power elite (Wall Street) controls public consciousness through their ownership of the PR firms serving government, media, and the non-profit industrial complex. As a result, all narratives, including those on social media, serve Wall Street.

To break free from the narratives of privatized mass communication, that now dominates public opinion, we have to break free from financial and psychological dependence on handouts from Wall Street–whether in the form of foundation grants from the power elite, or in the form of paid advertising and PR.

Otherwise, Wall Street will continue to set the civil society agenda, and consolidate social engineering through social media, leading to an environment where nothing of importance is ever discussed in public. What I have described as ‘a world of make believe’.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, has been corrupted by her affiliation with the Ford Foundation. She consequently supports Wall Street carbon market schemes like REDD, that displace Indigenous peoples worldwide.

44 murders of Indigenous activists in Honduras since 2010 prompted her to issue a warning about state-sponsored ethnic cleansing to facilitate free market (sweatshop state) development, but she failed to mention the US role in these atrocities.

Her partnership with the most powerful corporations on the planet creates a serious conflict of interest. Her embrace of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, that promote nuclear power and privatization of Indigenous resources, makes Corpuz a hypocrite of the highest order.

I was thinking about my new piece, which I sent to the usual progressive gatekeepers in Seattle media, and was pondering the reluctance of all of them to ever use the word ‘racism’ in any of their coverage of the fossil fuel export war between Coast Salish Nation and Wall Street. Warren Buffett, like his friend Bill Gates, never gets exposed for profiting from racism; indeed, racism doesn’t exist in the progressive gatekeepers’ moral universe, except when applied to mental morons like the militias. In fact, no mainstream media has even mentioned Wise Use terrorism since September 1992, when CBS 60 Minutes did a twenty-minute segment that showed clips of property-rights ideologues without exposing the industrial sources of their funding.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the pious poseurs that comprise the human rights industry avoid the topic like the plague–as it is too scary for them to deal with, and it involves mustering the courage to criticize the industrial villains who are also heavy-hitters of philanthropy. Warren Buffett, funder of 350, is a case in point. Same with Bill Gates.

This intentional omission by progressive media and activists has, of course, been thoroughly exposed by yours truly and my Canadian colleague, Cory Morningstar–which makes us pariahs in the minds of those dependent on handouts from the financial elite, i.e. Ford, Rockefeller, Soros, et al. Indeed, it is the reason that Public Good Project has been largely shunned by the financially-dependent writers who used our work without giving us credit for the last twenty years. I don’t expect this situation to change, and as Paul de Armond said, we’re still better off with them than without them, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep quiet about it.

There are a number of threats to the future of humankind. The big bugaboo climate change doesn’t even make my top five. If I had to rank them, I’d say these would be it:

Advertising

Corruption

Privatization

Plague

Religion

Climate changed can’t be stopped. All we can do is adapt to new and changing circumstances.

Corruption in government institutions and economic markets that determine climate change initiatives, however, pretty much guarantees that public policies and plans will produce profitable but not effective adaptation. An example of this is the Breakthrough Energy Coalition plan to reduce fossil fuel burning by building more nuclear power plants, a plan supported by the United Nations and promoted by Bill Gates.

Another global initiative promoted by Gates and supported by the UN is the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), now rebranded as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that plan to use the power of UN agencies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to convert the world’s remaining forests to plantations for growing such food products as GMO soybeans and palm oil. A key part of the SDGs, which is well underway, is building mega-dams in the Amazon River Basin and elsewhere to generate electrical power for the industrial development that is currently displacing Indigenous peoples and annihilating biodiversity.

Privatization of all things public – land, water, nature, government – is the ultimate sustainable development goal. These fall under the much-hyped ‘New Economy’ that Gates and the UN rolled out at COP 21 in Paris. Major promoters of the New Economy include Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, public relations puppets funded by fossil fuel magnates Warren Buffett and the Rockefeller Brothers to lead divestment campaigns that are working to privatize all aspects of ownership of the fossil fuel industry, including control of fossil fuel reserves on public lands.

Plague that results from the deforestation of Africa, Asia, and South America have already become a concern to the World Health Organization, and epidemics are forecast to increase exponentially as poverty resulting from ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples and the privatization of public wealth skyrockets, creating mega-slums in which public health programs are replaced by black market pharmaceuticals that are routinely misused, creating a globalized human petri dish for untreatable diseases, such as the ‘Nightmare Bacteria’ that forced the Center for Disease Control to quarantine an entire floor of a public hospital in Maryland—after three patients and a nurse succumbed.

Advertising – in the form of privatized mass communication and education – now dominates public opinion, to the point that controlling consciousness on a global scale is a prescribed art that integrates government propaganda with the news and social media, creating what has been described as a “discursive monoculture”. No matter what vital issue, crisis, or concern arises, public discussion is now choreographed by public relations firms, i.e. Purpose, that work in tandem with NGOs, e.g. Avaaz, and coordinate with government agencies.

Private equity media — that now controls all broadcast, print, and digital news in the United States – has created a fixed mentality behind the ‘clean energy’ chimera, in which all public control of climate responses using public monies will be determined by elite private interests, i.e. Wall Street. Architects of the final solution, e.g. MDGs/SDGs, by pimping poverty and all other social ills that befall humankind, promote the false hope of privatization and the termination of collective ownership in exchange for totalitarian corporate control of the planet.

Global civil society – thanks to Wall Street controlled institutions, markets, and NGOs – is now “paralyzed in a collective hypnosis” that rejects universal social interests and “systematically favours corporate interests”. The art of social engineering in which Avaaz works with elites such as Rockefeller, Gates and Soros in shaping global society, by building upon strategic psychological marketing, relies on the non-profit industrial complex, i.e. 350.org, as the “foundation of imperial domination”.

The Wall Street Takeover of Nonprofit Boards is the topic of a study published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Of note is that the percentage of people from finance doubled between 1989 and 2014, diluting charitable values and threatening shared governance.